I've been reading a lot about the history of Israel, and despite what the bible says about Solomon, it was never significant in any way. It occupies a tiny amount of land and wasn't even ever unified outside of one brief period. It was not an important player in it's region in antiquity and is rarely, if ever, mentioned in any of the relics we have from other nations. Why was someone as important as Vespasian, on the eve of becoming emperor, sent to quell a rebellion in such a tiny, historically insignificant state?

Did his seizures decrease? Did the lack of stress from not being Emperor anymore help his health issues?

From Plato's Symposium

“Socrates, come lie down next to me. Who knows, if I touch you, I may catch a bit of the enlightenment (sophia) that came to you under my neighbour’s porch. It’s clear you’ve seen the light. If you hadn’t you’d still be standing there!”

Based on this line, it makes me think that the concept of catching things from others existed. Did this originate with the observation that people caught diseases from each other? Even if they didn't know about germs, did they know that exposure to the sick could make you sick?

I checked those censuses in the 1900s in Bosnia, and found out that many of the municipalities were equally divided by two or three ethnic groups, and even in some small villages, there were two ethnicities living together.

Why was it such a mixed-ethnic place? Why did Croats even desire to live to Bosnian mountains under Ottoman control?

Patricia Crone and Michael Cook's Hagarism (1977) started the trend, if I'm not wrong. Its claims of Mecca being in the Levant and the early Muslim community being Jews are very unusual, to say the least. Apparently, the authors have partially rejected their own claims, but the book is still very highly regarded in its field. More recently, in his Muhammad and the Believers (2010), Fred Donner has claimed that early Islam was a multi-religious Abrahamic monotheism which also included many Jews and Christians. What is the evidence behind these ideas?

Did the communists try to abolish the Orthodox church or did they simply suppress its influence? Did other churches have a similar fate?

This may sound like a dumb question, but I’ve often wondered how Nazi occupiers were able to single out Jews. It may have been easier to identify in Germany but when they took over a new country, how did they know who was/wasn’t Jewish? Was it common to have your religion on your identification, etc? Wouldn’t it have been easier at the time to just say you weren’t a Jew? How were they able to confirm the ethnic/religion background of millions of people?

Obviously people in this sub know what Operation: Downfall is, so I'm not gonna explain it.

Why would a proposed land/sea invasion of Japan in WW2 need to be so much larger than any operation carried out against Germany? From what I've read, it would've been the largest amphibious assault ever carried out.

I get that Germany had surrendered by the time the Allies turned their focus on Japan and made preparations for this invasion, but wasn't Germany a greater threat than Japan at any point in the war? If they had the materiel for this invasion of Japan, why didn't they bring it to bear against Germany? The scope of Operation: Downfall puts the Normandy landings to shame.

I'd just like some context that I may be missing out on. Germany seems like the main Axis power throughout WW2, but when planning the invasion of Japan, the Allies pulled out all the stops. Were the stops not available to be pulled back when all that mattered was ending the war in Europe? Is it a personal grudge/vengeance situation, where America had a personal stake in the fight against Japan, so they wanted to bring the full might of their military to bear against them? But then, why bring only 3/4 might against Germany, who threatened the entire free world?

The received wisdom is that Christianity evolved from Judaism, a religion which does not encourage conversion (?). Was persuading people to covert a new thing to Christianity or does it have predecessors?

Edit: I meant to refer to voluntary conversion, although forced conversion would be interesting to learn about also

I want to comment on a recent trend I’ve noticed on this sub (one of my favorite subs on all of Reddit) in this hopes that it will stop. It goes like this:

OP posts a question asking for clarification or verification of a claim that happens to relate to a social justice issue. People will offer scholarly, well-cited responses, but their scholastics are mixed with some sharp criticism of OP for questioning this social justice issue. If that were the whole story, I’d be happy to assume that I’m just reading the tone of the responses differently than others and leave it at that. Criticism isn't necessarily a bad thing, after all. But increasingly I’ve seen the responses actually make straw man attacks on OP. Asking that a claim be verified is not the same thing as denying that the claim is true, and it’s certainly not the same thing as taking a philosophical stance on a social justice issue.

I’m speaking in generalities because I don’t want to call out any particular person, and because I’ve seen this multiple times on multiple different issues. I am not referring to instances in which OP is a troll or to questions asked in bad faith. And not that it should matter, but I am a progressive person who is extremely in favor of social justice. But the value of questioning the veracity of claims should be nakedly obvious, particularly to people who are liberal-minded.

I know there are trolls on Reddit, and it’s not always easy to read someone’s intent. But lets assume it’s positive. Or at the very least, please don't assume that questioning a specific detail is the same thing as promoting inequality (or whatever). I’d argue that the very careful moderation of this sub makes civility even more important. Many of the questions here only get one response, and if that response features straw man attacks and other nastiness the sub becomes a lot less fun for everyone.

Hello, everyone! In your opinion, what are the best books on Queen Victoria? Specifically something that focuses more on the quotidian aspects. Something that delves deeper into her daily life, lifestyle, tastes, preferences, beliefs, personality and relationships than her politics. Preferably a book that's scholarly and well sourced/cited rather than popular works. Any suggestions?

The popular perception is that everything was dirty in the middle ages. According to Monty Python all the peasants were "covered in shit". Battlefields turned into stinking fields of rotting corpses. Nobles would just relieve themselves in the corner during banquets.

To what extent did everything really just stink? Where there periods when it was better or worse? (either macro trends or specific events) Did some places smell worse than others (eg Maybe a peasant's hut smelled better than a noble's banquet hall if the peasant did their business outside while the nobles made a mess on the floor)?

I've heard tell from various sources that when Europeans came to the Americas, their diseases (smallpox, cholera, etc.) wiped out something like 90% of the native populations. When and how did scientists arrive at this estimate?

I'm working on a final paper about the role of women in collectivization, and we have to use only primary source documents, no secondary literature. I have no idea where to look for documents about this topic in English. It seems like most secondary literature uses primary sources that are in Soviet archives and are written in Russian, so those aren't accessible to me. Any direction on finding these kinds of documents would be appreciated, thanks!